Introduction

A toolchain is a set of tools that allows you to compile code. For OpenMoko, we have to differenciate the following use-cases:

Developing a single application

For this, you should use a prebuilt toolchain from the OpenMoko project. Here you can find a recipe to get started with this toolchain leading you through a series of steps to compile a project and run it on your target device. You might have heard about OpenEmbedded, however as an application programmer, you should not be using OpenEmbedded.

System Integration and customizing a distribution

For this task, you should use OpenEmbedded which builds its own cross compiler during the bootstrapping/build process. System Integration and customizing a distribution is out of scope of this page.

Basic toolchain usage

Prerequisites

You should be reasonably familiar with Linux and its command line tools, have an x86-compatible computer with at least 1G of free disk space. You should have experience with compiling programs from source using your local compiler. The remainder of this document will also assume you have write access in your home directory (~) and /usr/local/. If this is not the case, please call your local administrator for help.

Last but not least you should have a working setup that allows you to compile native software packages using the autotools build system (the triade of ./configure, make, make install).

The prebuilt toolchain is for x86_64 or i686. If you wanted, you could build it on your own with OE:

bitbake meta-toolchain-openmoko

Finally, everytime you want to use this toolchain, you need to alter some environment variables, so that your tools will be found. The toolchain provides a script to do that, so the only thing you need to do is to source it:

source /usr/local/openmoko/arm/setup-env

On Debian-based systems, you can use alien(+fakeroot) to create an easy-to-uninstall package from this .tar.bz2 (install with dpkg -i <package.deb>):

Building a sample project

If you want to install this project on host for staging usage later, a shared library, for example, you can then call make install to install it into the configured prefix.

om-conf --prefix=/usr/local/openmoko openmoko-sample2
make install

Packaging your application

We have included a script to make an ipkg out of your application. Note that this is not needed to test your application on the Neo (for that you can just scp the resulting binary and data over), however it's very handy if you want to distribute your application to others.

om-make-ipkg openmoko-sample2

Now you got openmoko-sample2_0.1_armv4t.ipk , you can `scp' it to your
Neo and install it:

Note that while you can redistribute the generated ipkg, be aware that this is a bare-bones ipk that contains no further information, i.e. you will lack library dependencies. See below how to fix this.

You can also supply the version number, a description, and an author / contacts string in a control file:

Advanced topics

Installing additional libraries into the toolchain

Sooner or later you will want to compile an application that has dependencies which can't be fulfilled by the precompiled toolchain, e.g. some obscure libraries.

In that case, feel free to request the inclusion of additional libraries into the next release of the OpenMoko toolchain. Until then, here is how you enhance your already installed toolchain. Say, we want to add the library called liburiparse:

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Introduction

A toolchain is a set of tools that allows you to compile code. For OpenMoko, we have to differenciate the following use-cases:

Developing a single application

For this, you should use a prebuilt toolchain from the OpenMoko project. Here you can find a recipe to get started with this toolchain leading you through a series of steps to compile a project and run it on your target device. You might have heard about OpenEmbedded, however as an application programmer, you should not be using OpenEmbedded.

System Integration and customizing a distribution

For this task, you should use OpenEmbedded which builds its own cross compiler during the bootstrapping/build process. System Integration and customizing a distribution is out of scope of this page.

Basic toolchain usage

Prerequisites

You should be reasonably familiar with Linux and its command line tools, have an x86-compatible computer with at least 1G of free disk space. You should have experience with compiling programs from source using your local compiler. The remainder of this document will also assume you have write access in your home directory (~) and /usr/local/. If this is not the case, please call your local administrator for help.

Last but not least you should have a working setup that allows you to compile native software packages using the autotools build system (the triade of ./configure, make, make install).

The prebuilt toolchain is for x86_64 or i686. If you wanted, you could build it on your own with OE:

bitbake meta-toolchain-openmoko

Finally, everytime you want to use this toolchain, you need to alter some environment variables, so that your tools will be found. The toolchain provides a script to do that, so the only thing you need to do is to source it:

source /usr/local/openmoko/arm/setup-env

On Debian-based systems, you can use alien(+fakeroot) to create an easy-to-uninstall package from this .tar.bz2 (install with dpkg -i <package.deb>):

Building a sample project

If you want to install this project on host for staging usage later, a shared library, for example, you can then call make install to install it into the configured prefix.

om-conf --prefix=/usr/local/openmoko openmoko-sample2
make install

Packaging your application

We have included a script to make an ipkg out of your application. Note that this is not needed to test your application on the Neo (for that you can just scp the resulting binary and data over), however it's very handy if you want to distribute your application to others.

om-make-ipkg openmoko-sample2

Now you got openmoko-sample2_0.1_armv4t.ipk , you can `scp' it to your
Neo and install it:

Note that while you can redistribute the generated ipkg, be aware that this is a bare-bones ipk that contains no further information, i.e. you will lack library dependencies. See below how to fix this.

You can also supply the version number, a description, and an author / contacts string in a control file:

Advanced topics

Installing additional libraries into the toolchain

Sooner or later you will want to compile an application that has dependencies which can't be fulfilled by the precompiled toolchain, e.g. some obscure libraries.

In that case, feel free to request the inclusion of additional libraries into the next release of the OpenMoko toolchain. Until then, here is how you enhance your already installed toolchain. Say, we want to add the library called liburiparse: